


Something is Different

by BlueParabox



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Carlos Doesn't Notice Night Vale is Strange, Carlos Notices Night Vale is Strange, Carlos goes Native, Gen, Night Vale Science, Post-Live Show: Condos, Science
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-29
Updated: 2014-08-29
Packaged: 2018-02-15 05:17:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2217129
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlueParabox/pseuds/BlueParabox
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carlos is not quite who he was when he came to Night Vale.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Something is Different

_Something is different_ , Carlos would think sometimes.

...

He would be in the grocery store, just picking up a few things to last him through the weekend. He wouldn't have been inside for five minutes, just a tactical run on the canned soup. He'd pay the humming cashier in cash and stray buttons, as usual--but by the time he'd return back to his car it'd already be getting dark. And he would check his watch and, sure enough, several hours would have passed.  And he'd sigh and mutter something like "Time isn't real, after all." Then he would almost drop his keys. _Something is different,_ he would think. Sure time didn't work the way he expected _in Night Vale_ but he'd never... before.... well what did "real" really mean after all? There was no particular reason to hold a firm belief in linear time, no more reason than to believe objects were solid when you knew them to be 99.9% void. In fact thinking about it would suddenly remind him of the detector he wanted to set up on the edge of the sand wastes and he would open his car and slide his groceries into the passenger seat, his mind occupied with the logistics of localized non solar power and he would drive away.

...

He would be in the lab listening to the radio, and as the broadcast slide into a particularly troubled weather he would reach for his danger meter. His hand would hover over it for a moment. _Something is different,_ he would think. Didn't he used to use a Geiger counter? It was definitely one of the tools he'd brought with him. But really, he would suppose, with everything going on in Night Vale radiation was the least of his issues. A multi-channel all-in-one device like a danger meter was really the only way to go in Night Vale. It had been a real life-saver on a number of occasions.  He would check the device and note that his lab was still hovering within the sickly yellow color caused by his small collection of caustic acids and scientific literature.  Confident that whatever howling mist had rolled into south Night Vale wouldn't attack him before he finished his coffee, he would go back to looking for typos in Rochelle's paper about the aggressive self re-assembly of the Night Vale Public Library.

 ...

He would be by the house that doesn't exist and he would look at it and think how it looks like it should it exist, how it sits there between two identical houses, how it would make more sense if it was there, but it isn't. He would stand on the sidewalk while the others talked about ringing the doorbell, and he would feel the conversation wash over him as though he had constructed it himself. _Something is different,_ he would think. A handful of adults had been standing out here planning for a year and yet no one had rung the door bell and yet that day... just then... he would want to.  

 ...

Today he is examining himself in the mirror, peering at his neck to see if the vocal chord replacement would leave a scar. He had been a bit nervous about doing it himself of course but it had probably turned out for the best. It was about time too, he'd seen first hand what throat spiders could do to a scientist, he didn't know why he'd left it so long. Carlos frowns. He looks at himself in the mirror. _Something is different,_ he thinks. No colleague he ever had replaced their vocal chords. In fact, Carlos realizes, no one he knows is even remotely qualified to perform such a procedure, let alone on themselves. He, himself, is an experimental physicist with an extensive interdisciplinary background that barely involved touching a scalpel before he came to Night Vale. And yet, it had seemed like the thing to do at the time. Carlos suddenly realizes what is different.

 _I am different,_ he thinks. He thinks about clocks that don't work, and black vans and self-surgery. He thinks about how natural it seems to him to be rained on by dead animals, or to be able to quantize danger or seeing a fully formed landscape in full color and sound dissipate like a mirage. He wasn't acting like himself at all was he?  He was acting like a capital-S-scientist from a children's cartoon. When had he stopped recording Night Vale's madness and started being a part of it? 

There is a knock.

"Carlos?" says the deep voice from the other side of the door, held up in hopeful expectation. "Are you almost done in there? Your green chili croissants are about to come out."

He smiles. And he is warm. "Yes, Cecil. I'm coming."

 _I_ am _different,_ he thinks, _of course I am._

_I'm happy._

**Author's Note:**

> Listening to Night Vale, it's hard not to notice that over time Carlos has gone from the only sane man in night vale to his own kind of wacky over-the-top craziness. And, well, you could blame that on evolving writing but really that's no fun. My own personal headcanon is that as Carlos gazed into Night Vale, Night Vale also gazed into Carlos and that the way he acts and thinks is actually very different than when he arrived--even the way his science works. 
> 
> Basically, whatever the universe says, I think that the Carlos who arrived in the first episode may have been an outsider, but Carlos as we know him now is definitely from Night Vale.


End file.
